Belize (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Lozano.

This paper explores Teotihuacan references found within the corpus of ancient Maya inscriptions. Classic Maya inscriptions analyzed for this investigation were derived from monumental architecture to ceramics. In the last decade more references to Teotihuacan within Classic Maya hieroglyphic writing have surfaced within the archaeological record and in museum collections. However, recently there has not been an in-depth study that analyzes the context of these recently uncovered references....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cynthia Hannold. Aura Barrientos. Alexandre Tokovinine. Francisco Estrada-Belli.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Teotihuacan Entrada of 378 CE is one of the most archaeologically rich events in the Maya Lowlands. Systematic examination enables archaeologists to measure the resulting impact of Teotihuacan's presence in the Maya area. Recent excavations at the site of La Sufricaya in Petén, Guatemala, provide fresh evidence to support Teotihuacan's influence in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Craig. Eleanor Harrison-Buck. Astrid Runggaldier.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and the History of Human-Environment Interaction in the Lower Belize River Watershed" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Investigations of an eastern shrine building in a residential group at Chikin Chi’Ha exposed a complex burial of an adult male and three children under the age of two who were placed near his head and feet. While there is abundant evidence for the construction and use of Classic period...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrian Chase. Jonathan Paige.

Stone tools and debitage were recovered from Late to Terminal Classic contexts of the site Nohmul in 1978 as part of a dissertation project. Since then, Nohmul has been heavily damaged by a road contractor who used structures from the site as road fill. Additionally, the chert production economy in lowland Mesoamerica has become an issue of great debate. Nohmul is situated roughly 30 kilometers from the Northern Belize chert-bearing zone and 30 kilometers north of Colha, the argued center of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dominica Stricklin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study applies isotopic analyses of carbon (ẟ13Ccoll) and nitrogen (ẟ15Ncoll) from bone collagen, with carbon (ẟ13Cap), oxygen (ẟ18O), and strontium (87Sr/86Sr) to faunal remains excavated from a peri-abandonment deposit at the ancient Maya site of Xunantunich during the Terminal Classic period. Peri-abandonment deposits represent a distinct phenomenon in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dawn Crawford. Brigitte Kovacevich. Michael Callaghan.

Holtun, located in the central lakes region of the Maya lowlands, was occupied from the Preclassic through the Postclassic. To date the Holtun Archaeological Project has mapped approximately 13 groups in the site core and over 30 residential groups in the periphery to the north. The majority of these surface residential structures date to the Terminal Classic and Postclassic. The residential groups excavated to date vary in their proximity to the site core, number of structures, construction...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma Messinger. Gabriela Saldaña. Jorge Can. Natalie Bankuti-Summers. Jaime Awe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ritual behavior during the Terminal Classic period (~AD 750-900) in the Belize Valley reflects the ecological and political concerns of the Maya during a time of prolonged drought and balkanization. Following their abandonment, some major regional centers were revisited, often in the context of pilgrimage. These activities left behind expansive deposits,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cynthia Robin. Laura Kosakowsky.

This presentation examines a series of terminal deposits at the ancient Maya farming community of Chan in Belize, Central America. We propose a contextual analysis of terminal deposits to facilitate the development of archaeological interpretations that move beyond the static category of "problematical deposits." The terminal deposits at Chan are located in its community center, primarily in two locations: in the eastern temple and southern range structure of Chan’s central group. The deposits...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Davis. Julie Hoggarth. Jaime Awe. Chrissina C. Burke.

Throughout the Maya Lowlands, archaeologists have identified Terminal Classic deposits associated with the final activities in ceremonial and domestic spaces. These features include concentrations of cultural material deposited in the corners of plazas and courtyards. At the site of Baking Pot, Belize, the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance (BVAR) project has identified several of these terminal deposits. This presentation will shed light on the types of artifacts that were deposited...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robin Robertson.

Joseph Ball has devoted his professional career to masterfully determining how the ceramic complexes at one site related to those at another, generating models for Maya movements and prehistory from the identified similarities or differences between them. Following his example, this paper proposes to take the data from Cerro Maya in Northern Belize and correlate it with other sequences in the region to produce a carefully researched sequence for the region with specific attention to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Takeshi Inomata. Daniela Triadan.

Excavations at Aguateca and Ceibal revealed a series of dense deposits associated with the ritual destruction of buildings. At Aguateca, such deposits were found in and around Structures M7-22 and M7-32 of the Palace Group, probable royal administrative-residential buildings. Excavators also unearthed similar deposits around Structures L8-6 and L8-7, temple pyramids in the Main Plaza. These deposits date to c. AD 810 when enemies attacked Aguateca. At Ceibal, dense deposits of broken objects...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sherman Horn. Anabel Ford.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ongoing research at El Pilar—an ancient Maya city located along the Belize/Guatemala frontier—has documented hundreds of landscape-modification features in the area surrounding the monumental civic center. The complexity and variety of these features, which include terraces, berms, quarries, check-dams, and aguadas, indicate the sophistication of Maya...

PROJECT Terry Powis.

The majority of terrestrial scanning projects in archaeology have focused on heritage documentation, preservation, and the 3D reconstruction of prominent sites and objects. While these are very important archaeological foci, not many have used terrestrial scanning methods for prospection and feature analysis, similar to the way many have employed airborne LiDAR. While airborne LiDAR scanning is able to situate and analyze archaeological sites on an expansive scale, the ground-based method also...

DOCUMENT Full-Text David M. Pendergast.

The excavations at Maria Camp were carried out in conjunction with an investigation of Eduardo Quiroz Cave, an archaeological project of the University of Utah in central Cayo District, British Honduras. Selection of Maria Camp for testing was motivated in part by the danger of destruction occasioned by location of the site near a well-traveled road, construction and repair of which have already resulted in leveling of several mounds and minor damage to others. In addition to the salvage...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Farnsworth.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2017, archaeological survey and excavations began at the Wallblake Estate on Anguilla, B.W.I., to examine the plantation landscape and the major activity areas of the estate. The research project is focused on understanding the development of African-Anguillan culture from its origins in the boom and bust plantation economies of the seventeenth and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Fries.

In the absence of LiDAR and similar high-resolution data products, an alternative approach was developed to model and predict site location information from low-resolution, publicly available datasets such as ASTER, LANDSAT, and aerial photographs. Manipulating and combining the analyses of multiple datasets permits refinement of modeling and detection capabilities. A large database of known sites, in assorted topographic and vegetative conditions and degrees of exposure, was used as a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Janine Billadello. Anarrubenia Capellin Ortega.

The Copan Valley in western Honduras has been the subject of a number of studies concerning human-environmental interaction, with particular emphasis on questions of ancient sustainable practices and whether or not land-use mismanagement contributed to the end of the Maya dynasty at Copan. The current PARAC project seeks to identify the range of foods consumed by the inhabitants of the Copan Valley during the Late Classic to Postclassic period. This paper will describe analyses conducted on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lori Phillips. Erin Thornton. Eleanor Harrison-Buck.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stable isotope analysis of carbon (13C/12C) and nitrogen (15N/14N) are often used to reconstruct ancient Maya diets. While these two isotopes provide us with a broad understanding of past subsistence practices, carbon and nitrogen are limited in their ability to differentiate freshwater and terrestrial based diets. Similar problems exist in other areas of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arianne Boileau.

Identifying formation processes of shallow archaeological sites can be difficult. At Lamanai, Belize, the main problem consists of distinguishing between pre- and post-Spanish contact deposits buried at a depth of 10 to 60 cm. Evidence of interaction with the Spanish includes a few European objects and two Christian churches. However, identifying pre-contact deposits is more challenging. Maya archaeologists typically rely on ceramic typology to establish chronology, but the main pottery type in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Kakaliouras.

This is an abstract from the "The Future of Bioarchaeology in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the 1970’s bioarchaeology has become both a valid specialization within archaeology as well as a standalone discipline with its own analytical and institutional traditions. Archaeology, though, enjoys a much more robust mosaic of competing theoretical frameworks than does bioarchaeology. From the processual to the postprocessual—to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma Slayton.

This is an abstract from the "Modeling Mobility across Waterbodies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the field of modeling water-based movement, many researchers have focused on modeling colonization or larger migration patterns. However, longer and more exploratory voyages encompasses only part of humanity’s use of sea travel. Evaluating closely connected sea-oriented communities can provide key insights into the everyday nature of sea movement,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maia Dedrick. Luke Auld-Thomas.

This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper considers the development of agriculture and society in northeastern Yucatán, Mexico, drawing on evidence from lidar imaging, paleoethnobotany, and isotopic studies. We focus on geological features known as dolines, sinkholes, or rejolladas—round, low areas that dot the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Baer.

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While core-periphery studies have long been employed to highlight distinctions between areas within a shared sociopolitical sphere, less articulated is what it means to actually be "peripheral." Or, for that matter, "liminal," "a hinterland," or "marginal," among others. This paper uses examples from two regions, the district of Kaupo, Maui, and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edith Gonzalez.

In an effort to discover the next big viable cash crop, the Codrington family of Antigua hired a botanist to implement a strategic introduction of species from the four corners of the British empire to Barbuda as an 18th-century living laboratory. This paper draws on historical documents to explore the dynamic and sometimes conflicting motives for agricultural experimentation - those of food security in times of drought or war versus finding the next "sugar."

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Dudgeon. Charles Speer. Beau Craner. Rebecca Hazard.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Thermal analysis (TGA/DTA/STA) has seen sporadic use as an archaeometric technique. Recent papers on archaeological mortars, plasters, ceramic pigments, and paints have sought to understand recipes or mineralogical components by thermal decomposition, especially where traditional chemical analysis by mass spectrometry is limited due to the multiple forms a...